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Fun with words and language

The other day I discovered a book called Eunoia, by Canadian poet Christopher Bök. According to Wikipedia this 2001 publication is an ‘anthology of univocalics’ – it’s unusual not because of the content, but because of how it’s written. Bök experimented with the English language by using certain rules to create a very interesting piece of writing.

First of all, there are five chapters – one for each vowel. Each chapter only uses words containing that vowel, while the letter Y is only used in one section in the extended edition of the book. And the title itself? Eunoia is a little-used word referring to ‘a state of normal mental health’ and is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels.

Click the links to find out more, and if you’re a bit of a ‘verbivore’ like many of our staff maybe you’ll also enjoy some of the entertaining language and vocabulary titles on our catalogue!